The documentary “$ellebrity” opens with two men running full-speed, screaming “Go! Go!” while setting off rapid flashes of light. Within seconds, two became about 20, strobes pulsating from each, as the mob descends on its prey: Jessica Simpson.
The singer tries to enter a nearby building, but it’s impossible. She is surrounded on all sides in a scene that begins to resemble less a celebrity documentary than “Zero Dark Thirty.”
As this plays out, we hear a voice-over from Jennifer Aniston: “It’s a really weird, scary feeling. You’re disoriented. You can’t see in front of you. It’s false imprisonment. I can’t get away. I can’t get out.”
“$ellebrity,” now in theaters and available through video on demand, was created by photographer Kevin Mazur to show what celebrities endure at the hands of the paparazzi.
Mazur, co-creator of the photo agency WireImage, says this chaos is just another day in the maddening world of celebrity.
“I was in Beverly Hills shopping, and I saw the paparazzi swarming Paris Hilton,” he says. “They were coming down the sidewalks and knocking people down, because they were walking backwards. They don’t care. They’re trying to get that shot.”
The problem has become so extreme that Mazur’s A-list celebrity friends were eager to speak about it on camera, including Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kid Rock, Salma Hayek, Elton John and Sheryl Crow.
Lopez and then-husband Anthony describe holding their wedding in their backyard, hoping for privacy, but not being able to hear their own vows due to the noise of paparazzi helicopters. Anthony was especially disturbed at the lengths they’d gone to escape stalking paps, including once hiding in the trunk of a car, all the while wondering, “When did this happen?”
Parker, almost in tears, tells of once pleading with a swarm of photographers not to chase her down a street, because she was pregnant. Her request denied, she ran sobbing into a nearby parking garage, where a couple on a motorcycle took pity on her. She and the woman traded clothing, and the man rode Parker out on his bike in disguise.
Mazur, a former staff photographer for Rolling Stone, has been shooting celebrities for decades, and learned early on that the stalkerazzi lifestyle was not for him.
“My friend was an autograph collector, and Robert De Niro was studying him for ‘The King of Comedy,’” he says. “We went to the set to meet Robert. He came out of his trailer, and I lifted up my camera and started taking pictures. He walked over, pushed me against a trailer, and said, ‘Don’t ever, EVER take a f – – king picture without asking!’”
Mazur’s friend smoothed things over, and De Niro later told Mazur that taking a picture without asking was rude. The lesson stuck, and Mazur attributes both his later success and his longtime friendship with many celebrities to this “work with them, not against them” attitude.
“I see what they go through,” he says. “Sheryl Crow said to me, ‘Why don’t you have me in the film? I was a B-, C-list celebrity, and then because I had cancer and a breakup with Lance [Armstrong], all of a sudden I have 30, 40, 50 guys chasing me around, when I‘m at the lowest part of my life.’ It’s sad that that’s what people wanna put out there.”
Mazur says the current paparazzi situation mystifies him because major paydays — such as the $400,000 doled out for the infamous 2007 shot of a bald Britney Spears attacking a car with an umbrella — are rare now that cameras are so ubiquitous and magazine budgets have shrunk.
There have been efforts in Los Angeles to legislate paparazzi behavior, but none have succeeded. A new call for regulation came from Justin Bieber after a photographer was killed on New Year’s Day while running across the street to capture a photo of the pop heartthrob.
Mazur hopes that his film can open a few eyes on the topic, but believes it may take a greater tragedy to rouse the sort of public outrage that will curb the insanity.
“Lawmakers now are all up in arms about guns because children got killed [in Newtown],” he says. “Is a child gonna have to get killed in a paparazzi incident for them to open their eyes and do something? It’s out of control. Something has to be done.”